Strain and Breakdown

Neil Lund

2024-09-05

Where does collective action come from?

Gustav LeBon

Gustav LeBon. By Jean-Nicolas Truchelut - This file comes from Gallica Digital Library and is available under the digital ID btv1b84506208, Public Domain

Gustav LeBon. By Jean-Nicolas Truchelut - This file comes from Gallica Digital Library and is available under the digital ID btv1b84506208, Public Domain

Context

  • France has revolutions in 1789. Then again in 1830. And then 1848

  • Napoleon III stages a “self-coup” in 1851 and rules as an effective dictator for the next 22 years

  • By 1870: widespread urban/rural polarization over Napoleonic rule and everyone is afraid of the Prussians.

The Franco Prussian War

… This does not go well. By 1870:

  • Paris is besieged (and not ready for it)

  • Napoleon the 3rd captured in Sedan

  • The French Second Republic is dissolved and an interim government ends up negotiating a humiliating armistice with Prussia.

The Third Republic

Following the armistice:

  • A conservative dominated national government is elected, and relocates the capital to Versailles

  • Parisian radicals (supported by the mostly working-class national guard forces) seize military equipment and declared a parallel government organized under democratic/socialist ideals (the commune)

Communard National Guard barricading a Paris street.

Communard National Guard barricading a Paris street.

The Paris Commune

Demands of the Communards:

  • Separation of church and state
  • Abolition of child labor and the death penalty
  • Pensions for widows of soldiers, remission of rents
  • Prohibition on fines imposed by employers
  • More controversially: hostage taking and hostage killing

Gustave Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger - Épisode de la Commune, place de la Concorde - P391 - Musée Carnavalet (via Wikimedia Commons)

Gustave Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger - Épisode de la Commune, place de la Concorde - P391 - Musée Carnavalet (via Wikimedia Commons)

Resolution

  • The government at Versailles regroups, and, by May, overtakes the city and massacres the Communards

  • The Communards retaliate by looting and burning the city

  • LeBon is present in Paris for the uprising, and has a decidedly negative view of the participants

Aftermath

The howling, swarming, ragged crowd which invaded the Tuileries… did not lay hands on any of the objects that excited its astonishment, and one of which would have meant bread for many days. - Gustav LeBon

Lithographie de Léon Sabatier et Albert Adam pour l’ouvrage de Victor Fournel, Paris et ses ruines publié en 1873.

Lithographie de Léon Sabatier et Albert Adam pour l’ouvrage de Victor Fournel, Paris et ses ruines publié en 1873.

Crowd Psychology: LeBon

For LeBon: crowd psychology is not like individual psychology

  • Crowds allow anonymity and lack of accountability

  • People lose their will and self control

  • They’re left highly suggestible (like hypnosis) and will behave in ways they’d never on their own

  • Since Europe is democratizing, crowds now rule.

Crowd Psychology: LeBon

Crowd psychology is not like individual psychology

  • Crowds allow anonymity and lack of accountability

  • People lose their will and self control

  • They’re left highly suggestible (like hypnosis) and will behave in ways they’d never on their own

  • Since Europe is democratizing, crowds now rule

Group Psychology and Collective Behavior

  • The study of group psychology, particularly pathological and violent behaviors is revived in the mid 20th century (why?)

  • More nuanced versions of LeBon’s general thesis gain influence in the 1960s (even among people who otherwise reject his politics)

Blumer: Elementary Collective Behavior

(According the McPhail, Herbert Blumer’s Collective Behavior model is indebted to LeBon’s.)

How collective behavior emerges:

  1. Disruption of routine (disaster, celebration, societal breakdown etc)
  2. Milling (people stand around and talk)
  3. People focus on a shared object or concern
  4. Common impulses emerge to take the place of normal routines
  5. Collective behavior

Illustration of Blumer’s model of collective behavior. From McPhail, Clark. The myth of the madding crowd. Routledge, 2017.

Ted Gurr: Rebellion

For Gurr: frustration-aggression paired with a sense of relative deprivation explains why some people rebel and others don’t.

Gurr’s research eventually led to the creation of the Minorities at Risk project.

Strain theories: shared assumptions

  • Crowd psychology is distinct from individual psychology. Crowds are “transformative”

    • Primarily through mechanisms of anonymity and disruption of routines

  • Crowds are more driven by emotion than reason, and are spontaneous rather than deliberate.

    • So pathologies like violence, rumor, social contagion, etc. are all more common in groups

  • Crowds are mobilized by social strain and societal breakdown, and participants are more likely to come from groups where loss of self is more attractive.

Issues

  • Are there scenarios where this makes sense? Are there scenarios where it doesn’t?

  • Why does this start to see sustained pushback in the later 60s and 70s?

Are crowds anonymous and spontaneous?

Student activists on their way to register voters in Mississippi in 1964.

Student activists on their way to register voters in Mississippi in 1964.

Are crowds anonymous and spontaneous?

Strain theories emphasize the role of disorder, “anomie” and societal breakdown, to explain contentious behavior, but:

  • At least in some cases, being part of organizations and networks is a positive predictor of participating in contentious behavior.

  • “Anti-social crowds” are an oxymoron. Sustained collective action requires people who can play nice with others.

McAdam, Doug. “Recruitment to high-risk activism: The case of freedom summer.” American journal of sociology 92.1 (1986): 64-90.

McAdam, Doug. “Recruitment to high-risk activism: The case of freedom summer.” American journal of sociology 92.1 (1986): 64-90.

Are crowds unrestrained?

The Who concert disaster

Crowd characterized as reverting to “animal instincts”, but:

  • “Stampede” was more accurately described as a progressive crowd collapse: people fell when a door collapsed, and then others fell on top of them.

  • Most victims reported helping others, receiving help, or witnessing strangers helping someone else.

  • Cultural norms (particularly gender norms) played a predictable role.

Johnson, Norris R. “Panic at ‘The Who Concert Stampede’: An Empirical Assessment.” Social Problems, vol. 34, no. 4, 1987, pp. 362–73. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/800813.

Johnson, Norris R. “Panic at ‘The Who Concert Stampede’: An Empirical Assessment.” Social Problems, vol. 34, no. 4, 1987, pp. 362–73. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/800813.

Are crowds uniquely suggestible?

  • People are suggestible in small AND large groups
  • Conformity to norms can just as easily enable violence as work against it
    • Milgram’s study of obedience shows people willing to abdicate responsibility even in normal conditions with just one other person.

Illustration of Milgram’s 1963 Behavioral Study of Obedience

Illustration of Milgram’s 1963 Behavioral Study of Obedience

Does relative deprivation lead to violence?

Strain theories emphasize the role of social strain, grievance, and anomie, but:

  • Patterns of unrest don’t neatly correlate with grievances
    • People are aggrieved all over the world, but violent rebellion is the exception rather than the norm! (base rate fallacy)
    • Surveys of racial unrest in the 60s suggest that resources and political structures are more important than deprivation.
  • Experimental studies find little evidence that frustration predicts aggression under social pressure.

Revisiting the Paris Commune

Does LeBon’s characterization ring true?

  • The Communards are organized and embedded in local networks and institutions. The rebellion is a product of organization, not chaos.

  • Their actions deliberately draw on culturally relevant symbols and behaviors, not on “animal instinct”

    • Barricades

    • Committees

    • Declarations, occupations, revolutionary governments

  • They’re violent and irrational… but so is everyone else.

    • Collective action is always difficult. Governments do it better than rebels because they have more resources.

Critique

  • Sustained collective resistance often highly organized and sophisticated, and people maintain some self control even in a riot.

  • Forms of collective action are historically contingent and adapt to cultural norms, policing, government structure etc.

  • Participants know each other! Being part of a social network makes you more likely to protest.

  • Violence and deprivation are not neatly correlated (at a minimum, strain alone can’t explain rebellion)

Takeaways

  • Collective behavior tradition remains influential, but see serious challenges in the 1960s.

  • Contentious behavior is no less rational (in the narrow rational-choice sense) than individual behavior.

Going forward

Contemporary theories of contentious behavior generally place more emphasis on:

  • The role of organization, structure, and resources in explaining contentious behavior over the role of social strain or grievance

  • The social and political context for collective action, over studying “crowds” on their own; continuity between conventional state-approved political behavior and non-conventional forms.

  • The importance of rationality over pathologies (even for extreme behaviors like genocide)